Gypsy Blood (Silent)

Spanish cavalryman Don Jose Navarro leaves his family and fiancee Delores behind, and rides off for Seville, where he is to receive a promotion. Carmen, a beautiful Gypsy girl is arrested for starting a brawl and Don Jose is assigned to escort her to jail. The seductress convinces the soldier to let her escape, an act for which he is jailed and reduced to the rank of private. Obsessed with Carmen, Jose is willing to sell his soul for a night of love, and sinks further and further into complete depravity. When he kills an officer in a duel over the girl, he is forced to flee with Carmen to a Gypsy hideout in the mountains. Carmen quickly tires of Don Jose and begins conducting a love affair with the greatest bullfighter in Seville. With a price on his head, Don Jose sets off for the city, desperate to bring Carmen back, any way at any cost.

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch in Germany just before the 1918 Armistice, Gypsy Blood is a faithful and lavish adaptation of Prosper Merrime's classic French novel, "Carmen," and stars beautiful, charismatic Pola Negri. Passion, Pola's 1919 collaboration with Lubitsch, proved so successful in America, that by 1922 both had been given Hollywood contracts. Pola had great success in films such as Forbidden Paradise (1924) and Hotel Imperial (1927) but her performances were sometimes obscured by headlines linking her romantically with high-profile paramours including Chaplin and Valentino.

• silent